I’ve been writing about the issue of Facebook suspending recommendations for pages, including many pages associated with the wine, beer, and spirits industries. (See here and here.) I’ve seen a number of recommendations from various sites about how to get your Facebook page recommendations restored. I disagree with what some of these pages are saying, though I believe that they are well-intended.
For businesses that have been affected, here are my recommendations.
1. Check that age restrictions are properly set for your page.
2. To do so, go to your Facebook page Settings > Followers and public content > Age restrictions.
3. Choose your appropriate setting. Mine is set to “Alcohol-related.” If it’s already properly set to what you want it to be, leave it.
Personally, I would not make any other changes at this time. I would not delete old content. I would not change your name or tags or anything else. I would not alter what you are doing on Facebook either.
My strong feeling is that this is an algorithmic error that has taken place at Facebook that has swept of up millions of pages. It is not anything that page owners have done wrong nor is it a new policy that Facebook has rolled out. It’s something that they screwed up.
To the extent that is true, nothing that you do will positively impact getting recommendations restored other than to continue on as before. Rather, the algorithm needs to correct its error.
Will this work? I don’t know. My recommendations were restored. I did not make any changes. Of course, they could be taken away again at any moment!
Questions are, first, will recommendations be restored for the potentially millions of pages that are impacted? On what timeline?
Second, will Facebook acknowledge that there is a problem and stop causing a lot of concern and wasted time and money for page owners? Not that the company cares, but it is also causing itself a significant amount of brand damage with page owners/advertisers.
Overall though I would be VERY cautious about making changes to your page or following other recommendations that are out there that require significant time or effort. It also appears that there might be people looking to take advantage of this situation and providing false information on YouTube in particular.
If you look at any of this information, please do so very critically. As usual, do not download anything. Do not install anything. Do not run any scripts.
As I stated in a previous post, I did find the following article from Lunabean Media very helpful. There is a lot of good information in there.
I am continuing to try to draw attention to this issue on a media level and through various local agencies in hopes of driving resolution. I plan to continue to do so. I am also providing updates on the Northwest Wine Report Facebook and Instagram pages.
IMPORTANT: For anyone ADDING age restrictions to your Facebook page. If your page was not previously age-restricted and you add an age-restriction, your page will automatically be removed from all of the groups that it is a member of. Age-restricted pages cannot be part of groups.
Additionally, age-restricted pages are not able to post directly to groups, as they can’t be members of them. However, *individuals* can post content from age-restricted pages into groups.
For example, my Northwest Wine Report Facebook page could not post something to a group page. That is not allowed, as Northwest Wine Report has an age restriction. Nor could Northwest Wine Report be a member of a group. However, I could, as Sean Sullivan, post something from my Northwest Wine Report page to that group.
Don’t ask me why, but those are Facebook’s rules. It’s been that way for a while.
Northwest Wine Report is wholly subscriber funded. Please subscribe to support continued independent content and reviews on this site.
To receive notifications about new articles via email, click here.
My brother who collects and comments on comic book art had a similar thing happen to him around Thanksgiving last year. He was actually kicked off FB. No warning, no ability to contest it, no way to figure out what even happened. A week later, he was back “on”. No changes to anything on his part, and NO explanation on the part of FB. Weird
Sorry to hear that, John! The reality is that Facebook has so many users and so many pages with so many posts every day that humans can’t be involved with much of anything associated with it. It’s all algorithms. And sometimes those algorithms run amok or make stupid mistakes or just do things that humans wouldn’t.
A favorite example is my oldest brother saw a post about Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, a game from the ’70s. My brother commented with one of the lines from the advertisement, “I’ll knock your block off!” He was banned from Facebook for 14 days for inciting violence. He appealed. Robo-denied.
That’s Facebook today.
I don’t see a setting for age-related content on the Followers and public content page. >>shrug<< Would it be affected by my other settings, or by the fact that I don't have professional mode?
Kathleen, sorry for the confusion. This only applies to business pages, not to personal pages.